By Jessica Domel
Multimedia Reporter
The fate of the next five years of farm, nutrition and conservation programs lies in the hands of lawmakers today. The House Committee on Agriculture has started its markup of HR 2, the Agriculture and Nutrition Act of 2018.
“One hundred and sixteen hearings, three years-worth of work and six listening sessions across the country, an untold number of hours put in by both sides of the committee trying to get to this point,” Congressman Mike Conaway, chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, said in an interview with the Texas Farm Bureau Radio Network. “If you set aside the SNAP portion, the rest of the farm bill is reflective of the normal, traditional bi-partisan work that this committee has always been known for.”
The committee’s draft of Title I includes coverage for cotton. It also addresses a five-year recession, depressed prices and a 52-percent drop in net farm income by maintaining safety net coverage through the Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC) and Price Loss Coverage (PLC) programs.
According to a summary provided by the committee, PLC will “be strengthened by allowing reference prices to adjust when markets improve and by allowing farmers affected by long-term exceptional drought during the previous opportunity to update their yields.”
To mitigate county-by-county disparities, ARC will use actual yields collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency (RMA). Dryland and irrigated revenues will be calculated separately in the proposal. The physical county of the farm will also be considered when determining ARC benefits.
The Marketing Loan and Livestock Disaster programs are maintained with some adjustments. The no taxpayer sugar policy is also maintained.
There are some changes in store for dairy farmers. The Margin Protection Program-Dairy will be renamed the Dairy Risk Management Program (DRM).
Through DRM, the first five million pounds of milk production on a dairy is eligible for higher coverage levels at lower premiums.
Milk not covered under DRM is eligible for a comparable crop insurance policy.
To ensure the program’s accuracy, feed costs will be studied. Class I milk calculations will be adjusted to help dairy farmers better manage their risk.
Under Title II, the conservation title, funding for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) will increase to $3 billion per year.
The Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) will be folded into EQIP.
“With respect to the Conservation Stewardship Program, we’re going to honor existing contracts, but we’ll do away with that program, and fold those dollars into EQIP because we feel that’s just a better program and gets a better bang for the taxpayer dollars,” Conaway said.
Acreage under the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) will increase to 29 million acres over the life of the legislation.
“We do that by resetting rental rates. They are currently disconnected from current commodity prices. 2014 was the last time we did a bill and commodity prices were much higher. We’re going to reset those so they’re not overly competitive against commodity prices. We think that will free up dollars to expand the acreage under CRP,” Conaway said.
The draft also includes $100 million for a feral swine eradication and a control pilot program, $250 million per year for the Regional Conservation Partnership Program, $500 million per year for the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program and $100 million annually for the Small Watershed Rehabilitation program.
Unlike Title I, which had very few changes, the nutrition title could see big changes this year.
“The premise is you’ve got work-capable folks from 18 to 59 that have some skills or no skills that are unemployed. You have a growing economy that has jobs coming available that have skills that are necessary. We simply want to bridge that gap with federal resources. As (Glenn Thompson) said, the states are already in this business, but we’re going to provide more resources,” Conaway said.
Senior citizens, the disabled, those caring for children under six and pregnant wom